Master Your Workflow: SUPER Impact Effort Calculator

Designing is hard. Picture this: You’ve done everything right. You have extensive research on your users and your market. You have brainstormed and ideated. You are surrounded by sticky notes and spreadsheets detailing everything you could and should make.

But now, it’s time to make a prototype. Where do you start? This is where projects-that-could crash on the rocks. And the more thorough you’ve been, the harder it now gets. How do you prioritize the “right” answers?

Impact Effort Charts

A common design and project management trick is an impact effort chart. Take two axes, and rate each task from 1-10 based on its difficulty and pay-off. This helps, at a glance: don’t waste time. But it’s often not so simple.

Outside of extremes, a lot of tasks are hard and time-consuming, but might be worthwhile. For the bulk of the bell curve, you’re back to unguided judgment calls. Ouch.

If you give up trying to measure things, you’re back to the old classics: following your heart, and cleaning up fires three weeks from a deadline. Having been on the design and management side of these situations, I assure you, neither is fun.

We need a more refined tool. But how?

A Higher Impact Chart

This is the sort of topic I’ve researched more than once in my career. While browsing my bookmarks, I found this blog post by project manager Itamar Gilad. In it, he breaks down the shortcomings of impact effort charts, and proposes a nuanced alternative.

It’s brilliant. Any designer, manager, or anything else should know to learn from those who’ve done this longer than you have. Often, you can share the yield of years’ experience, for free! So, we’ll trust his judgment on the various ranges in his new chart.

However, making (and using) a chart like this was still too high effort. Like many of you, I always prefer to work smarter, not harder, even if it takes wild excesses of work to do so.

The SUPER Impact Effort Calculator

I made an automatic digital version. All you have to do is input the impact and effort you think a task will take, from low (1) to high (10). The sheet will categorize the task to Mr. Gilad’s categories, from a “Loss Generator” to an “Easy Win”. I also suffered through some math to output a task priority rating using a logarithmic scale. This way, it’s easy to sort tasks from high priority (10) to low priority (1).

You can make a copy of the calculator here:

It’s not the prettiest thing in the world (and if anyone can make a prettier version, please get in touch), but I hope it is useful. I’ve tried to spruce it up with some color-coding. Using the color scale, warm reds are the lowest, and cool purples are the highest. The cooler the results of the calculator, the cooler the results of your project should be.

I recommend integrating the code from this calculator into your own project’s spreadsheets. I hope this helps improve your task tracking and prioritization. Thanks to Mr. Gilad for the conceptual basis. If anyone has ideas or know-how to make a more polished project out of this, let’s talk. Together, we can help designers suffer just a little bit less.